By TOM ZUCCO, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2000

A weeklong look at everyday life with the Internet. Stories

It was supposed to turn us into remote little islands. We'd lose track of time and float anonymously from chat room to chat room on a sea of e-mails. The more we tapped away on our keyboards, the less we were going to vote, attend church, help our kids with their homework.

Worst of all, we were going to be less trusting and generally less healthy and happy.

The Internet was going to open the world to us, but we were going to get so caught up in it that we would neglect our families, our jobs, even ourselves.

We were going to encase ourselves in our own little dead zones.

"The Internet was clearly destined to deepen the isolation of Technological Man from the unhappy consequences of using this blessed electronic system," New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote in 1995.

"Isolation was inherent. A human alone with his machine talking to machines activated by other humans alone. Easy to hide in that maze. Be as bestial as instinct wishes and so what? Hard to catch you, punch your nose, put a stiletto into your kidney."

But that was way back in the mid-1990s, before anybody knew how the Web would affect our lives. Well, we don't have to speculate anymore. Now we have research. Like almost any other major phenomenon, the Internet has been the subject of intensive academic scrutiny. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists -- they all lined up for grants to study how we live with the Internet.

Though it's still early, the results are starting to come in.

First, the bad news.

In February, Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University, released one of the first large-scale surveys detailing the impact the Internet has on American society. It showed that as people were spending more time online, they were spending less time in social activities. Less time hosting dinner parties. Less time attending PTA meetings. Less time, Nie said when the report was released, "with real human beings.

"When you spend your time on the Internet," he added, "you don't hear a human voice and you never get a hug."

There were implications for every aspect of people's lives. When Ford Motor Co. announced it would give all its employees a personal computer and Internet connection, Nie cited statistics showing that people with computers did more work at home, while their hours at the office either stayed the same or went up as well.

"They (Ford) just bought themselves hundreds of thousands of hours of free labor," he said.

Nie concluded that the Internet is creating a vast group of people who are increasingly cut off from society -- and everything else going on around them. The study also reported that 60 percent of regular Internet users said they had reduced their television viewing, and a third said they spent less time reading newspapers.

But is that kind of cocooning really happening?

Is "Internet" synonymous with "isolation"?

The good news is, Lee Rainie is absolutely certain it's not.

Rainie is the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a non-profit research center in Washington. Like Nie, Rainie also conducted a large-scale survey that looked into how the Internet affects our lives. In March he surveyed 3,533 adults, of whom 1,690 were Internet users. His report was released last month.

Among the findings:

• Nearly 60 percent of those who exchange e-mail with family members or close friends said they are in contact with those people more often thanks to e-mail. Only two percent said they were in contact less.
• As a group, Internet users are more likely than non-users to have a robust social world. The use of e-mail seems to encourage a deeper sense of social connectedness. And the longer users have been online, the more likely it is that they feel e-mail has improved their ties to family and friends.
• Eight percent of Internet users said they thought they were socially isolated; among non-users, 18 percent felt isolated.
• Seventy-five percent of Internet users said they had visited with family or friends the day before; 61 percent of non-users said they had made such visits.

In short, the Internet actually strengthens social ties.

"I was a bit surprised," Rainie said last week. "We thought there might be mixed signals, but the findings were so robustly in favor of the Internet . . . apparently, people get the Internet a lot and feel good about it."

But if Americans are spending more time online yet not neglecting their families and other responsibilities, is there something else they're neglecting?

John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, has found that people indeed watch less TV than they used to, and there was also some loss of sleep associated with Internet use.

"But there's an old adage," Rainie said, "that says if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. We found, particularly with heavy users of the Internet, these are the most engaged, vital people.

"It might be because they're doing it all, certainly when it comes to tending to their families and jobs and communities."

Confused?

Hey, we're just getting started. There is a ton of information about the Internet pouring in, but it doesn't necessarily make the picture any clearer. Take, for example, this bag of facts, drawn from the Rainie study and others.

• Percentage of households that have visited the Web site of a city, state or federal government office: 24.
• Percentage of households that have contacted a government official by e-mail and never got a response: 6.
• Number of times President Clinton mentioned the Internet in the 2000 State of the Union address: 6.
• Number of dot-com balloons in last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade: 2
• Number of American households joining the Internet per hour: 760
• Sale price of the domain name "business.com": $7.5-million.
• Average age of an Internet user: 35.
• Percentage of full-time, four-year college students in the United States who use the Internet: 90.
• Percentage of Internet users over age 50: 51.
• Percentage of African-Americans online: 35.
• Percentage of Hispanics: 46.
• Percentage of whites: 50.
• Percentage of households that say they have made a campaign contribution through the Internet: 2.
• Percentage who said they would be "much more likely" to vote if they could do it online: 32.
• Estimated number of Americans who send and read e-mail each day: 48-million.
• Number of e-mails sent on a typical day in the United States: 285-million.
• Percentage of Internet users who, if asked to give up e-mail, say they would miss it: 75.
• Percentage who said they'd miss it a lot: 50. (More women than men reported they'd miss it.)

One thing we can say with certainty is that the Internet is here, and here to stay. Figuring out what it is doing to us is another matter entirely.

So who's right? Is it Nie or Rainie?

Are we becoming more isolated or aren't we?

Bruce Bimber, director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, falls somewhere in the middle. He thinks the population using the Internet is too diverse to accurately measure. No two people start using the Net at the same time, and as with TV viewing, their habits can vary greatly.

"We have to stop thinking about the Internet as a single entity with a single effect," Bimber told the New York Times. Much more research will have to be done before we fully understand its impact on our lives.

But more than curiosity will spur the research.

An estimated 55-million Americans go online every day, and more than half of them stay online for at least an hour.

Most of those people have credit cards.

"The Internet has become a part of the research agenda of an increasing number of places -- universities, research entities -- that are looking at it because it's brand new," Rainie said. "But there's a commercial market to this research. Trillions of dollars ride on the studies."

Just as Nielsen ratings steer television programming, research into who is online -- and what they're doing -- could greatly affect what providers put on the Internet.

Rainie's biggest fear, however, doesn't have to do with the commercialization of the Net. It has to do with the dark side of cyberspace -- stalkers and pornography.

"I've got kids," he said, "and there are things online I'd never want them exposed to and people online I'd never want them to have contact with. To the degree the Internet allows that material and those people to enter my home, that's something to worry about.

"On the other hand, you don't want to be paralyzed by fear. Every new communication technology and medium that I'm aware of eventually raises questions of the type I and others are raising."

Many of the issues raised about how the telegraph, the telephone or television would change society are the same issues we are discussing about the Internet. How will the ability to break down barriers and reach out to other people change us? How will it change politics? The role of women? Of children?

"All of these questions get asked," Rainie said, "and people make all kinds of assertions. Some are wildly optimistic, some wildly pessimistic.

"We're just starting to see the Internet version of it."

Clicks

Here are some sites detailing research done on the social impact of the Internet.

• http://www.psu.edu/dept/medialab/research/compisolation.html -- Results of a Penn State University Media Lab study on the effects of computer use on social isolation.
• http://www.pewinternet.org -- Pew Internet and American Life Project study results.
• http://www.apa.org/journals/amp/amp5391017.html -- An American Psychologist magazine report titled, "Internet Paradox -- A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?"

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